As the person who broke both the Nvidia bad bumps story and their ousting from Apple, I can say with authority that the real reason Nvidia is out is the patent trolling rampage they tried to start. I wrote some of it up, a bit blurred to protect friends, here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semiaccurate.com%2F2...

The bad bumps were a big blow but that was just money. The patent trolling threats were a deal breaker for Apple and many other silicon vendors. Go look up the Nvidia vs Qualcomm and Samsung suits for more but the company is not wanted anywhere in the ecosystem. Some HAVE to use them but no one wants to.

      -Charlie

I have an older Quest of and a mobile one that I just gave away. The Quest was used for a few days and put on a shelf, something I keep meaning to go back and play with. Then I got an email from Facebook saying I needed to make a Facebook account to keep using my hardware that I (didn't actually) pay for (long story, test sample) but did own. FSCK that. There are a few things that are dealbreakers for me in the tech world and a forced Facebook/Meta spyware account is near the top of the list.

At CES this year, VR/AR stuff was in pretty high numbers in high profile areas but the interest seemed a bit tepid. At MWC last week, there was precious little VR/AR and it was mostly ignored. I think we have reached the 3D TV phase of VR and it is all downhill from here. Discounts are telling, not much to save the sector now, it will become an admittedly useful niche device but mainstream is dead. AR is a different story but we are years away from basic usefulness there.

Yawn. It deserves a quick flaming death but VR will drag on for a while yet. The sooner it drops out of the media hype cycle, the better for us all.

              -Charlie

So basically any site with a comment section or that reports on anything close to the topics of piracy, security, or whatnot is dead. As are search engines themselves, and anything with user content that is not strictly and extensively modded by humans.

Good luck with that.

There is a good reason for them doing this, or at least a really good bit of plausible deniability. If you have ever been on the receiving end of Samsung's attention, you will know they are a vindictive company so I am under know illusions that this is an intentional way to screw those who unlock their phones.

That said the excuse they will use is that the camera is now 'secure' and part of the secure boot/root of trust chain and is critical for security and transaction mechanisms. Kinda true as long as you ignore the billions of 'unsecure' cameras out there, but lets pretend they don't exist. In short they are saying on a rooted phone, the camera app that can do things, likely sign but any attestation of state is what matters, can no longer be secure and won't run. Thus the camera is bricked.

"This is for your own good". And their profits. Now you know why.

              -Charlie

"Are Apple's Privacy Changes Hypocritical, Unfair to Facebook and Advertising Companies?"
Hopefully, yes.

True but that is the whole point of platforms like Facebook, they are in the business of choosing what you should see and not see. You might not have noticed but you don't get uncensored, full streams in Facebook, ever. You can't even force the option if you want to, they curate what you see 100% of the time so by your definition they are in the business of censorship.

The fact that they will not curate obviously harmful product is bad enough. The fact that they promote it preferentially because it is more profitable is completely unacceptable. They had, and probably will have again when eyes are off, an advertising keyword for pseudoscience. They know what makes them money and that ALWAYS overrides any even blatant negative affects.

Add in the fact that they are legally shielded from being held accountable for their actions and you have a perfect storm. If they were just repeating what users post without any interference, your point might stand. They aren't so it doesn't.

People here are conflating Facebook doing the right thing and removing content with censorship. Censorship is when a person is not allowed to say or promote an idea. No one is suggesting that a person is not allowed to say or promote ideas, within certain quite reasonable legal limits like yelling fire in a movie theater.

What we are saying is that Facebook should not be allowed to promote known false, dangerous, malicious, and intentionally inflamatory comments _FOR_PROFIT_. We are not asking to censor Facebook's speech in any way, we are saying they should not be allowed to do such things that they know are wrong or sometimes illegal for money, BIG difference.

Facebook's business model is based on making people angry, afraid, and polarized. They are effectively monetizing the destruction of the social order, and doing it in a knowing way. They should not be allowed to do so, or at least not be allowed to do so with the legal shields they have.

No one is suggesting that we remove their, or their user's right to speech, just that they should not be allowed to magnify it for profit.

Very few places seem to have the balls, or more to the point lack the tendrils of the advertising sales team infecting the content, to call Intel on their obvious BS.

This 'performance gain' is vs a 3-year old laptop with HALF the cores and a GPU that is 25% slower. Think that matters on games? Oh yeah, the older CPU only boosts to ~4GHz so 25%+ slower. Take out that 25% from the GPU and the new Intel part is 10% faster on average with twice the cores. Does that tell you how long this turbo boost can be sustained for? Does it tell you how often it can hit the max turbo?

If you go to Ark and compare it to the predecessor I9-9980HK, you will notice it is the same die, same GPU, same everything but 100Mhz faster, 300MHz if the OEM bothers to implement all the bells and whistles and puts in a cooler heavy enough to keep the CPU tJunction under 65C. Good luck with that for more than a few miliseconds.

            -Charlie

You sound really good but you are completely wrong here. QC froze Apple out because Apple was sending QC secrets to Intel to help them out, then refused to let QC audit them as required in their contract. See here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semiaccurate.com%2F2... (Note: Self link)

            -Charlie

So you are saying that Qualcomm making better products cheaper and pricing them lower is a problem because... ? I thought that was capitalism.

Bullshit. Intel bought *4* fully functional modem teams, botched literally every modem they made, and now are trying to blame others. By botched every design, I mean there was literally never a single design that met the promised pre-silicon spec, the highlight of this was the Apple iPhone with both modems. The Qualcomm modem in the iPhone ran at 1Gbps in other phones that used it, 600Mbps, same as the Intel modem, in the iPhone. Coincidence?

Then there was the fact that they 'showed' multiple 5G chips and demos, all photoshopped fakes, but never once to my knowledge showed 5G silicon, functional or not.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semiaccurate.com%2F2... (Note: Self link)
I could go on but after a decade of literally never delivering on the lowest level promises, it is laughable that Intel is trying to blame others. If you want real humor, Intel's official tweeting of this travesty use A FAKE CHIP to promote it. You can't make this stuff up.

                  -Charlie

Yup, you are right, and I was in the audience too. I guess I am still jetlagged. In any case the release cycle of GPUs says that they should have silicon back by now for Navi, or really soon if it is not already in hand. It was originally due in Q4/2018 but it got pushed back earlier this year, my educated guess is because of things on the process side.

              -Charlie

As the person who first dug out the specs on the next gen Playstation over two months ago here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.semiaccurate.com%2F2...

I found this 'report' to be laughable. No it was borderline ignorant and seems to be based on my work, rampant speculation, and a random technical phrase generator. Also do note that the phrase I used in the story was Playstation 5/Next, I did that for a reason.

So what do we know? Navi is slated for ~Q2/2019, likely early, next year. Lisa Su held one up at Computex during her keynote, this is not a 2020 product, nor is it tied to the Sony roadmap. I won't go into the sheer technical ignorance of these statements, but lets just say that GPUs don't have a >18 month validation cycle.

As for the bit about Vega being designed for Apple and Navi for Sony, do I really need to comment on that? It sure sounds good if you are at Youtube levels of technical understanding but, well, just thinking about it makes my brain hurt. Go look back at Polaris, the pre-Vega architecture that formed the basis of the PS4 Pro and the XBox OneX, look at the release cycles for those consoles versus the release cycles for the GPUs. See a pattern?

And delaying the APUs because of a console? Really? You might want to consider the current launch cadence for AMD chips, roughly yearly on the consumer side. The Ryzen 1xxx launched about a year ago, March 2017. Ryzen 2 launched in March of 2018. That puts Ryzen 3, presumably with Navi, when? I guess that is up to Sony, NOT.

All in all this 'article' makes my head hurt. It is a rehash of technical stupidity and rumors slapped together by someone with no sources, no clue about how things work, and desperate for clicks. (Note: I am often accused of that but my site doesn't have ads, clicks buy me nothing) For once I wish people on the net would just try and logically parse 'articles' a bit before they repeated them as 'truth', the internet is a big, relatively worthless echo chamber for a reason.

              -Charlie

I think that subscriptions, like micropayments, are evil and ruining the industry by blatant money grabbing and extortion. That said it is easy to see why the companies inflicting this are doing it, it makes them lots of cash.

So my question to all of you who dislike this state of affairs, what are you doing about it? Have you contributed time or money to open source alternatives? Have you purchased a commercial alternative? Are you sitting on your ass bemoaning the state of affairs while enabling it?

          -Charlie

Why bother when you have Bing ads? :P